Valentina Shevchenko and Liz Carmouche are now tied 1-1 across two bouts. Carmouche won the first fight, a 2010 encounter, with a controversial cut-related stoppage. Shevchenko won the second fight, which headlined Saturday’s UFC Uruguay card, with a dominant unanimous decision win, retaining her UFC flyweight belt in the process.

While this is not the type of rivalry that generally screams trilogy, Liz Carmouche is more than willing to step into the cage with Valentina Shevchenko again to settle their score.

Were she to get that opportunity, Carmouche believes she’d stand a much better chance of unseating the dominant flyweight champ.

“Absolutely I should have pushed the pace more,” Carmouche said at the UFC Uruguay post-fight press conference (h/t Middle Easy). “There’s a lot I’ll have to go back on and look at the tape to see changes I want to do, and things I want to fix. But I think I could have pushed it more to have a better chance at getting the win.

“After seeing her hesitance and her caution tonight and her not execute her usual game plan and not have that cutthroat killer instinct that everybody knows, but actually be hesitant? That’s not something we’ve seen her do before, so I’d absolutely do it again, and do things differently, and actually take that belt from her.”

From the sounds of it, Liz Carmouche definitely anticipated a more aggressive Valentina Shevchenko in the cage at UFC Uruguay.

“I absolutely anticipated that she would be a lot more aggressive and less hesitant,” she said. “I think that because of the style that I was doing was throwing her off, but I thought that she’d be much more resilient in it, and be more aggressive off of that instead of being more cautious and hesitant.”

Do you think we’ll see a third fight between flyweight rivals Valentina Shevchenko and Liz Carmouche in the future?

This article first appeared on BJPENN.COM on 8/12/2019.